Financial Armageddon was only hours away

In a recent TV interview with Max Keiser, the German trend forecaster Dr Joern Berninger claims that the recent massive EU Greek bailout was really about the backdoor bailing out of France, rather than the front-door bailing out of Greece; Dr Berninger states that the French banking system was exposed to the Greek debt situation to the tune of €700 billion euros and was therefore technically bankrupt.

If the Greek default had taken place, as expected in early May, then the French banking system would have immediately collapsed into a colossal sink hole too, taking the French government along with it. If Dr Berninger is right, then this would help explain the frenetic petitioning of Angela Merkel by Nicolas Sarkozy at that time, in the face of intense opposition to the Greek bailout by an angry German public which subsequently punished Angela Merkel in the polls for agreeing to the bailout; the whole process may have been less to do with the French President unselfishly saving the ‘European Project’ and more to do with him simply saving his own French government.

Or as Ludwig von Mises might have put it:

“There are no irreconcilable conflicts between selfishness and altruism, between economics and ethics, between the concerns of the individual and those of society.”